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Mythes 'Trois Poèmes', Op 30

Introduction

The three movements of Mythes Op 30 (1915) were a product of the composer’s collaboration with Kochanski, to whose wife Szymanowski inscribed them. Writing to her in 1930, he was to claim that he and Kochanski had created ‘a new … mode of expression for the violin’. Christopher Palmer has interpreted this as meaning that the wide range of playing techniques and timbres employed in Mythes is never a virtuoso end in itself, but simply an integrated means of giving rise naturally to what the composer already wished to say. Szymanowski, he states, ‘removes the element of self-consciousness from virtuosity’. Certainly the virtuosity is as refined in nature as the music itself, in that the violin and piano parts interact seamlessly, demanding great intuitive subtlety and telepathy from both players.

Recordings

This disc contains some of Szymanowski’s most overtly sensual and vividly gestural music; his lush, exotic textures intensified and crystallized in miniature. This recording features the wonderful young violinist Alina Ibragimova, who appears on h ...» More

The second movement, Narcisse, conveys a more heart-sick languor. Szymanowski’s homosexuality undoubtedly informed his response to the Nietzschean Dionysiac theme and presumably added to other personal epiphanies encountered in more exotic (and liberal) parts of the world. The music embodies two clearly defined themes in its opening section, but diversifies in its central passage before undergoing an almost claustrophobic degree of contrapuntal superimposition. The self-longing of Narcissus finds an apt musical parallel, in which perhaps we discover the composer too gazing over the youth’s shoulder at the reflection in the water. This is neither unduly fanciful nor prurient, since Szymanowski was also the author of a homoerotic novel, Ephebos, a portion of which survives to indicate an expounding of his beliefs concerning the interdependency of carnal love and artistic fertility.

The final Mythe, entitled Dryades et Pan, is a scherzo in which, to quote Christopher Palmer’s apt description, ‘a hot summer wind blows through the forest, causing it to tremor and quiver into activity’. Deft exploitation of the constant open D string of the violin and oscillating quarter-tone pitches above and below on the G string produce the kind of effect one can imagine Milton having envisaged when he wrote in Lycidas of airs that ‘Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw’. This is intensified later by violin harmonics, initially unaccompanied, then awakening from the piano a response reminiscent of the opening to La fontaine d’Aréthuse. This section embodies one passage of striking similarity to Debussy’s Cello Sonata, intriguingly written in the very same year. The ‘fast’ music balances hectic surface activity and slower-moving harmonic blocks. The movement makes as if to return to its beginnings, but is subverted by further arpeggiated harmonics like some ghostly ‘Last Post’ drifting far above the bass register of the piano. After the briefest of references to the opening, the hot summer wind snuffs itself out, vanishing almost as abruptly as the malign presence in Ravel’s infamous goblinesque solo-piano inspiration 'Scarbo' (from Gaspard de la nuit).